Tag Archives: Election

It is time for Facebook to look itself in the mirror and decide who it wants to be when it grows up.

In the wake of the 2016 US elections there are volumes of conversations taking place over our possible future, the ongoing tension and conflicts, and the root causes of the election. The causes are numerous and not simple to categorize–your perception of the election’s results may make you view one cause as a positive or a negative, for example. But the causes are out there and, if they did not have the impact they desired, then the results of the election compel those causes to re-examine their purpose and impact. Facebook is one of them.

Mr Zuckerberg’s post talks about the potential impact of fake stories that circulated on Facebook. He believes those stories had no impact, but that also once you go down the road of trying to mark stories as true or fake you get into dangerous territory. Even mainstream reports may omit details or sometimes get stories wrong. That is entirely valid criticism and it is entirely hogwash.

Certainly you can draw the line at marking what is a real or fake story and you can argue about moving that line. Right now, no such line exists. That allows completely fabricated stories to gain widespread circulation perpetuating their untruths. Once that bad information has taken hold it is almost impossible to eliminate their impact, as Facebook well knows with the constant resurgence of Facebook untruths (Facebook is going to start charging you, if you post something then you keep control of your content, they now own all of your photos, etc.). Even if another true story circulates right after the original fake story you will still have a large number of people who think the fake story may have had a detail wrong but the overall theme is true. And of course that has an impact.

Facebook and other social media sites have become widely popular for lowering the barriers of distributing content. We can now connect with people and share information with simplicity and ease. That has powerful positive effects but it also has some drawbacks. The widespread dissemination of fake news is one drawback and that can be addressed by Facebook if it wanted to do so.

But there’s a bigger picture here, one that I fear Facebook is missing by only talking about fake news. Because the true impact of Facebook and all of social media isn’t just about fake news but rather that these platforms designed to increase communications between people may be doing the opposite. There is a wealth of articles and research about how the same technology that gives us access to so much content may also force us into a bubble of only content that we agree with. The most recent iteration is how this may have impacted the election, such as this New York magazine article points out, but this is an older concept as this fantastic 2011 TED talk points out (carve out 9 minutes to watch it if you can).

This is where Facebook can best start looking in the mirror. Because Facebook doesn’t just set up bubbles for its users, it is a bubble generating machine.

Facebook stays successful by making sure you keep coming back. It wants to give you content you find compelling and enough new material so you visit the site many times a day. It also can’t give you too much content or you’ll get frustrated and leave. And it also can’t give you content that will make you never come back–whether because you found it offensive or distasteful or any number of reasons.

This is the entire reason for Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm and why you sometimes see articles complaining how Facebook users don’t see all their friends’ posts. Facebook constantly tweaks and plays with this program to maximize your time on Facebook. More time on Facebook means you keep coming back and you’ll see more ads that they can sell to fund the platform. That makes sense from a platform and business perspective.

But as a content and media company, Facebook also needs to ask if maximizing user bubbles is truly in the best interests. Compare this to a snack food company that discovers if they add more sugar then people like the snacks more, they consume it more, they buy more of it. That makes sense from a business perspective and yet it may not be the best possible outcome.

Facebook and others need to look themselves in the mirror and decide who they want to be. They can take the all business approach of doing what is the best for profits or they can decide there is a greater responsibility at play. I don’t know how to burst those bubbles if Facebook chooses to do so. I do know that Facebook has some of the most brilliant content engineers, data scientists, and platform designers on the planet. If they want to address this problem, they can start coming up with solutions. Because bursting those bubbles may be vital in helping to bring people together, to help us increase understanding of problems and come up with solutions. Popping those bubbles may help heal the polarizing partisanship that has only grown over the past years.

Those bubbles may be nice to live in, but they may choke us in isolation. It’s time to figure out whether they’re worth keeping.

Either way, Facebook needs to look at their role in defining public conversations and make a decision. Sticking their head in the sand and pointing at the other causes is irresponsible. No, Facebook isn’t entirely to blame. It also is not blameless. Where it goes from there is entirely within their control.

Tablets in 2000 had a passable Notes app, but Angry Birds was horrible.

Election nights are always fascinating to me. Not only do you have candidates and issues but you also have analysis from across the spectrum and a wealth of different technologies to show you the results. 12 years ago the country watched while Tim Russert used an early tablet device known as a whiteboard to show the country how the entire election hinged on the outcome of Florida (a lesson we would continue to learn for weeks after). Last night we had networks using giant interactive maps sketching out potential scenarios, zooming in on specific counties and comparing their results with previous elections.

Now that social media has reached a level of commonplace acceptance (we’ll talk about that in a future post) I found it fascinating to see how it became part of the election night process. We were connected with our favorite reporters or candidates or analysts and could instantly see what they had to say throughout the night. No more just waiting on a particular channel until they came back on or flipping between channels to find them. And we could interact with our friends and colleagues around the world whether they agreed or disagreed with our political views.

Personally, I was able to participate in a group chat with ten friends whom I frequently email. In the interests of being a bit more interactive we ended up on a giant Facebook chat session and over the night sent over 1,000 messages back and forth. We had participants on both coasts, people in the middle of the country, even one Chicago resident who happened to be in Australia. It was an amazing feeling to have these conversations as the night progressed and more than once I was thankful for what social media has done to connect people.

But as we’ve seen with so many issues, social media can have benefits and drawbacks. Let’s be positive and start with the benefits. Beyond connecting people and providing a forum for discussion, social media is fast and widespread–two fantastic qualities for something so time sensitive as a day to conduct nationwide voting. Some states in the Hurricane Sandy-ravaged northeast passed emergency laws that allowed residents to vote in any polling location given the difficulty in traveling.

Multiple polling location voting is also something that was available for the first Presidential election in my own, non-hurricane ravaged Travis County in central Texas. Austin residents could vote in any polling location. That’s a great thing provided you have access to a Twitter feed or connected account that would tell you while the line at a grocery store is 1.5 hours long there’s a polling location two miles away with nobody in line. I expect that by the next election we’ll see a collection of apps or message networks that can better alert voters of potential lines and advise them where to go. I also hope that trend of allowing people to vote in different locations continues. That’s a great benefit social media can bring to the current election process.

There is, however, a dark side to social media and elections. Social media has flooded us with opportunities to share content with our friends and community. Status updates, locations, photos, videos, badges–these are a part of our lives and we want and, to some degree, expect to be able to share the content we choose with the audience we choose. So we grow concerned or upset when we hear stories about how smartphones are not allowed at some state’s polling places.

But there’s also a dark side to pictures in polling places. Like stories of employers who threaten employees with termination unless they take a picture of their ballot showing they voted for a particular candidate. Or organized efforts to force proof of votes through threat of violence or rewarding with payment. The risk of ballot recording can be determined by each state but it is something to keep in mind–my last post was about how social media has broken anonymity, a valuable commodity. Certainly, anonymity for a ballot is an important value to protect and if it means we lose some funny filtered Instagram pics of a ballot as a trade-off then I hope most people will be okay with that.

However, elections are getting more complicated and now many voters do their research on their phones. Possibly while in a long line waiting to vote. Walking into a polling place and then being told you can’t use your phone can cause a bit of a panic if you’re struggling to remember dozens of propositions or ballot initiatives or local candidates. You should be able to record your notes onto paper and then vote, if that’s an issue. Still, that’s remarkably inefficient and something that social/mobility should be able to address. I’m also hopeful the problem of recording via smartphone can be solved while allowing people to use their phones for appropriate items like accessing notes, but it is a tricky balancing act.

And then there’s the biggest issue of them all–why can’t we vote using our smartphones? Not exclusively, of course. There should still be polling places and absentee ballots and other measures. But with the rise of smartphones across the country, shouldn’t we be able to use them to vote? That may seem difficult or outlandish, but wouldn’t we have thought the same thing a few years ago about depositing a check with a phone (now many banks support this by taking a picture of the check)? Or paying bills with your phone (even more banks support this, heck even Starbucks lets you do it)? Or signing contracts (you can e-sign contracts on your phone now, even complex contracts like real estate closings)? Those are activities that many years ago we couldn’t have predicted could be done with a phone, yet they are now commonplace. Why not voting?

When you see video footage of people waiting in lines for hours to exercise their most fundamental of rights I would think everyone can agree that we should have a better solution. Granted, many people were concerned about e-voting machines and you still see the random stories of glitches and rogue software so there’s sure to be some pushback on the idea of using your phone to vote. But we’re fooling ourselves if we thought paper ballots were always secure–phones should be more secure than previous systems we relied upon for decades if not longer. And there would always be other options.

Social media is about conversations and speech. Voting is the ultimate realization of free speech. Shouldn’t social media and the mobile technology wave be able to help bring voting into the 21st century? It’s an idea worth pursuing and we’ve got a little under 4 years to work on it.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER

SoMeLaw Thoughts are entirely my own opinion about social media legal issues and not the statement, opinion, or in any other way affiliated with Dell.

This means I could be completely wrong about everything I post here. Sure, I’ve practiced for over ten years in technology law and have supported Dell’s social media team for a fair amount of time, but if you get five lawyers in a room and ask a question you’re likely to get seven different opinions. Oh, and it’s a really boring room. And someone will probably start quoting Latin. So I could be totally wrong here.

This is also not specific legal advice for you. I don't know you. Even if I know you I didn't write this for you, I wrote it for the blog and you're reading it. You want legal advice? Hire an attorney! A good one.